Collections & Series

Who was Cassandra?

In the Iliad, she is described as the loveliest of the daughters of Priam (King of Troy), and gifted with prophecy. The god Apollo loved her, but she spurned him. As a punishment, he decreed that no one would ever believe her. So when she told her fellow Trojans that the Greeks were hiding inside the wooden horse...well, you know what happened.

Search

February 24, 2009

Un Rendez-vous Dentaire (V)

Von Doderer, too, was exploring
these same forces of attraction and conflict in his novel of
intersecting lives in early twentieth-century Vienna: a world hung
like an embroidered curtain between east and west, where Hungarian
accents mingled with German, Orthodox Christianity shadowed
Catholicism and German reformation protestantism, and Judaism flowed
like an ever-present undercurrent...

Thinking about the American president embarking on the first of his foreign travels, I remembered a dialogue I'd read the previous night, two thirds of the ways through the novel's second volume, in which the narrator, Herr von Geyrenhoff, is in a cafe talking to Edouard Altschul, a bank director. The year is 1927. The two men are professional, not personal, friends, but they've always instinctively liked each other, and during this conversation they both make a decision to reveal quite a bit, though continually to speak formally. Geyrenhoff, very Viennese, is curious about Altschul's German origins, and asks if he's been back in his "venerable Frankfurt of late." The bank director remarks that he's been living in Vienna for twenty years - his wife is Viennese - and likes it very much. But he says "a light has gradually dawned" on him, and what it revealed only became fully clear the last time he went back to Germany - which, in Vienna, they call "the West."

"Out there, people are simply writhing and thrashing themselves to death," he says. "Not out of diligence, or efficiency, or joy in work, or out of necessity, because they have to. Oh no, that's not it, not at all. On the contrary. It's done out of weakness, out of a kind of neurotic compulsion..." He searches in his breast pocket for a notebook and reads a partial phrase he has copied from a recent book, but which sums up this malaise for him: "The much praised strong modern man, in truth so much infected by his own efficiency that his weakness..."

And then he goes on to say that living in Vienna has taught him this, about other people and about himself: "There in the West I would never have become conscious of this condition...but when you go from illness to health - though only a relative state of health - and then return again, as I often return from Vienna to Frankfurt, you see how things stand."

And that is just it. Travel, of the sort most of us undertake today, is far more like Obama's temporary disembarkation from his airborne American world than it is an immersion in another culture "until the light dawns." We simply aren't in the soup long enough to become stewed ourselves; our flavor never blends with the pot nor the pot with us. Travel changes and enlarges us, for sure, as Sarah Palin demonstrated to the contrary; we come home with a new spice to put in our kitchen, so to speak. But we do not really see "how things stand." Neither do the congressmen who jet off on weekend tours of the Middle East, or the rich college kids on the latest version of the Grand Tour -- though there is a modern compulsion to posture about travel as if it is life itself.

Even now, after four years of life in a French and international society (North American yes, but one that tends to lean out the window), I'm sure I see only partially, compared for example to these Romanians for whom the differences, and the accompanying adjustments, must have been enormous. Unless someone has actually lived elsewhere long enough to gain sufficient perspective to see his native society through fresh eyes, he will be like von Geyrenhoff, the native of Vienna, who listens to what Altschul is saying and finds himself "looking across a gulf."

But the other side of this is the enormity of what we do find, in travel so slight as to involve a mere step across one's neighborhood into a different one. And that is the astonishment of the universal embedded in what is strange and foreign: the willingness to find a way to communicate, the small unspoken ways of saying "welcome", the palms on my face that say not only, "don't worry", but "I see you, and here I am too." I suppose those hands are what we sometimes feel reaching toward us out of the books and music, art and languages of other cultures, carrying just enough warmth to sustain the hope that the desire to create and to connect is stronger and more human than the other forces we know so well from our fears.

Comments

There are many ways and many levels through which travail brings us to know ourselves. As a Canadian moving to Québec from Canada’s ‘west’, I was a privileged immigrant as I already knew how the money and the postal system worked. But I was an immigrant none the less. The job skills that I had brought with me, which were dependent on the ability to write, were useless in this new linguistic context. Like many immigrants I had to begin again. At the same time I have had to recognize that others see me through a history that I do not recognize as my own, through assumptions that colour the way that I am seen. I have learned to laugh at these assumptions, and even to play with them, but they cannot be discarded like ill-fitting clothes.

I have been forever marked by my journey to Québec, and it is the most wonderful gift. Learning to speak, read and even write in another language has opened up the world in new ways. I have learned the histories which define this place, seen the gaps between these histories and those that I grew up with, and come to understand that the world is traversed by many stories. Access to newspapers and Web sites in French has made still other points of view available. And my students, some who travel no farther than from across the river, while others arrive from Haiti, Africa, Europe and South America, continue to open my eyes to new perspectives on the world.

Thank you for pointing out that I wrote "travail" rather than "travel" in the first sentence of my comment. It is a warning to people who are considering living in a language other than their mother tongue that the capacity to spell might be seriously compromised. … at a certain point the two languages begin to interpenetrate as a result of moving back and forth between them.